Meanwhile, she was alone in the house. Just under three weeks after her return to Sacramento, Arnie had announced that he was moving out in order to move in with Maureen Ginnis, a bottle-blonde who worked as a dispatcher at the FedEx offices at the airport. In a way, Tammy was glad. She knew Maureen a little, and she was a nice woman; a better match for Arnie than Tammy had ever been. And having the house to herself — knowing that when she got up in the morning she didn’t need to see anybody or speak to anybody if she didn’t want to (and there were days, sometimes four or five in a row, when her mood fell into a kind of trough, and she was so sluggish she could barely keep her eyes open; then others when she would turn on the television and some stupid quiz show would make her bawl like a baby) that made the craziness she felt itching inside her a little easier to cope with, because she didn’t have to conceal it from anyone. She could just take the phone off the hook, lock the doors, draw the drapes and act like a crazy lady.
She got a bad cold a couple of weeks after Arnie left, and bought up a cabinetful of over-the-counter cold, flu, congestion and expectorant medications. They usually made her feel so dopey that she avoided taking them, but in her present situation it scarcely mattered if she felt half-comatose. Having bought the medicines she dosed herself to the gills with cure-all syrups the color of fancy French liqueurs, and went to bed in the middle of the afternoon to sweat it out. It was a bad move. She woke about one in the morning from a dream in which she’d been lying in bed with the goat-boy clamped to her breast, suckling noisily. She could smell the meaty sweetness of her breast-milk as it seeped from the corner of his hairy mouth, and heard the long middle nail of his foot catching on the comforter as he jerked around in animal bliss.
With the weird logic of dreams she had very reasonably told Qwaftzefoni that she felt feverish and he would have to stop. She had pulled him off her breast with some difficulty, only to discover that he had hold of her hand, the sharp nail of his thumb pressed hard against the pulsing vein in her wrist as though threatening to pop it at a moment’s notice. Then he had guided her palm down to the clammy place beneath the curve of his stomach, where his prodigiously veined prick stuck out from folds of infant fat. She felt a row of tiny objects down the underside of his shaft.
“They’re black pearls,” he said, before she asked the question. “They’ll increase your pleasure.”
In her fever-dream, she barely had time to register what the little bastard was proposing before he was climbing up onto her, her tit spurting in his fist as he milked her, her screams going for nothing. In the hellish heat of the room the spilt milk went bad in a heartbeat, souring on the sheets. It stank as if they’d been soaked in vomit, the stench rising around her with physical weight, as though it might smother her.
She had begged for the goat-boy to leave her alone, but he clutched her hand so tight she was afraid he’d break the bones if she didn’t obey him. So she had taken hold of his pearl-lined ding-a-ling and proceeded to jerk it.
“You want it over with quickly?” he had said to her.
“Yes … ” she had sobbed, hoping he’d let her go. Men knew how to do it better than women anyway. Arnie had always turned up his nose at the offer of a hand-job. “You never do it right. I’d prefer to do it myself.” But there were no easy get-outs here.
“Then stay still!” the goat-boy had said, flipping over backwards, still keeping his grip on her fountaining breast, but relinquishing the enforced masturbation for a grosser game. He was straddling her head now, his thick little legs just long enough to raise the cushy divide of his ass six or seven inches above her nose. The coarse hair on his goaty legs pricked her face. It thickened around his buttocks, and he’d long since given up trying to clean it. The stench made her gag.